Be an Analytics 50 Superstar: Revisit the Past in Your Data to Predict the Future

Studies show that it costs companies millions of dollars or more every time they re-review the same document that
is part of a legal or compliance case. In fact, lawyers often review the same document dozens of times or more for current and future matters. For example, a privilege review of 200,000 documents previously assessed in prior cases typically costs nearly 3 million dollars, so you can imagine the proliferation of costs when reviewing these same documents for responsiveness or other designations in additional cases.

Corporations spend billions of dollars on eDiscovery, and this will continue to be a primary pain point. But by incorporating big data analytics strategies across all legal and compliance matters, lawyers are not only equipped with insight into their data that can help them be more efficient in their casework, they help reap numerous business benefits:

1. Save significant future costs. Analytics have helped expedite discovery mostly by enabling predictive coding, e-mail threading, near-duplicate detection, and data clustering and visualization techniques. While the efficiencies of these descriptive and predictive analytics are well-documented, the most significant limitation is that they can only be applied within a single case – not across all cases. That’s why it’s nearly impossible for insights from one case to be applied to the next matter or the next one after that. The ability to repurpose work gets slimmer when databases are scattered across third-party vendors. This is often the case and makes each database a virtual island with limited knowledge transfer.

   By applying big data analytics to consolidate insights from data across matters and disparate hosted review platforms, these problems are solved – saving millions of dollars associated with future casework.

2. Prevent sensitive data from becoming topline news. Documents from different, but related, cases are often reviewed by different teams of outside counsel. This heightens the risk that the same documents will be coded inconsistently, potentially leading to inadvertent disclosure of privilege, trade secret or other confidential information.
3. Mitigate reputational risk and regulatory fines. Each year corporations spend billions of dollars on regulatory fines, legal fees and other costs of non-compliance with the myriad (and growing number of) regulatory requirements across industries. Many of these expenses stem from hidden problems lurking in email and other unstructured data sources. In many cases, these problems could have been prevented or detected at a much earlier stage using big data analytics to predict and detect issues, powered by the analysis of prior legal and compliance databases that reflect billions or more of attorney and expert decisions.

Considering these very substantial and quantifiable benefits, it’s easy to why CIO.com has named Conduent a top 50 leader in the Analytics 50, a collaboration between CIO.com and Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, which recognizes the top analytics executives and their companies who are implementing innovative analytics to overcome business challenges.

For companies and their law firms to stay relevant and competitive in today’s business world, big data analytics is an emerging approach to make realistic risk assessments, prevent reputational risk and avoid excessive legal spend and regulatory fines. Read the Conduent press release here.